Since its inception following World War II, the field of
contemporary Chinese studies has been confronted by a series of
extraordinary events. The first generation of specialists,
schooled in a classical sinological tradition that stressed
China's unique cultural continuity, was immediately challenged by
what seemed-at least on the face of it-a major rupture with the
past: the Communist Revolution of 1949. Not surprisingly, these
specialists' efforts to explain this momentous aberration defined
the initial contours of contemporary Chinese studies. Although
scholarly opinion on the nature of the revolution was deeply
divided, the debate centered on the extent to which the ideology
and practice of Chinese communism could be said to reflect
indigenous cultural influences, as opposed to a wholesale
importation of the Soviet model. (1)

Once they had recovered from the initial shock of "losing"
China, many analysts chose to take comfort in their sinology,
emphasizing a peculiar political tradition intelligible only to
the classically trained specialist. As C. P. Fitzgerald
summarized this position, "The Chinese conceptions which underlie
the theory of government are unique; unlike any others, and
evolved in China. The roots are deep and nourished in a soil
alien to the West; the flower is therefore also strange, and hard
to recognize."(2) Superficial revolutionary changes were believed
to belie a deeper continuity: "The Chinese Communists, embracing
a world authoritarian doctrine in place of one local to China,
have enlarged the arena in which old Chinese ideas can once more
be put into practice, in more modern guise, expanded to the new
scale, but fundamentally the same ideas which inspired the
builders of the Han Empire and the restorers of the T'ang."(3)

Although never fully resolved (as academic arguments seldom
are), the controversy surrounding the origins of Chinese
communism abated as the storm of revolutionary struggle was
overtaken by the calm of regime consolidation. A second
generation of specialists set about the sober task of documenting
the development of Chinese communism, which seemed increasingly
to resemble its Soviet precursor in many respects.(4) Whether
wedded to a totalitarian model or to a more pluralist
perspective, this new generation of China scholars-now
increasingly trained as social scientists rather than as
historians-identified the Chinese Communist model's numerous
similarities to Soviet and East European counterparts.(5)

However, just as the comparative communism perspective was
gaining popularity, along came the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution of 1966-1969. Faced with the challenge of explaining
this unexpected event, those in the contemporary Chinese studies
field again were caught up in controversy. China's dramatic break
with Soviet-style communism-exemplified in Mao's Cultural
Revolution-aroused renewed interest and disagreement over the
continuing importance of indigenous political traditions.
However, unlike the first generation of scholarly debate on the
Communist Revolution of 1949, the new round of controversy was
debated instead by scholars whose training and academic
self-identity derived from the burgeoning field of political
science. Drawing on recent trends in their discipline, these
political scientists viewed the Cultural Revolution as a problem
in "political development." Wedded to central precepts of the
modernization paradigm, they stressed the role of "political
culture"(6) in fashioning China's unorthodox and uncertain
developmental path.

Modernization theorists emphasized the close relationship of
political culture to "political socialization" (that is, "the
process whereby political values and attitudes are inculcated")
and "secularization" (that is, "the process whereby men become
increasingly rational, analytical, and empirical in their
political action"). (7) In the case of China, distinctive
patterns of childrearing and schooling (or "socialization") were
blamed for the seeming irrationalities (or lack of
"secularization") characteristic of Red Guard excesses during the
Cultural Revolution. By this account, the Cultural Revolution
constituted a crisis in political development whose origins could
be traced back to peculiarities of Chinese culture-particularly
as embodied in conflictual authority relations. (8)

Although strongly influenced by prevailing political science
fashion, advocates of a political culture approach within the
Chinese studies field also departed methodologically from
mainstream currents in their discipline. Most analysts of
political culture, dovetailing their studies with the behavioral
revolution then sweeping the U.S. social sciences, pursued their
projects through statistical interpretations of large-scale
attitude surveys. (9) By contrast, students of Chinese political
culture-denied access to field research in mainland
China-resorted to a much less rigorous brand of methodology.
Personal impressions (presented as psychocultural analysis) were
combined with small-scale surveys of unrepresentative samples in
Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as schematic references to
philosophical texts and historical events, so as to cobble
together a portrait of Chinese political culture that proved
unconvincing to many in the sinological and social science camps
alike. (10) As a result, the concept of political culture
developed a rather unsavory reputation among China specialists.
Moreover, as fascination with attitude surveys waned within the
political science profession at large, the study of political
culture was largely abandoned by other wings of the discipline as
well.

The simultaneous fading both of the Chinese Cultural Revolution
and of the disciplinary interest in political culture drew
scholars of contemporary China back to more prosaic styles of
comparative analysis. Elite policymaking-whether approached in
terms of factionalism, bureaucratic politics, or
ideology-dominated the field. (11) In addition, those who deigned
to search below the commanding heights of the political system
for the activities of ordinary peasants and workers generally did
so from a "structuralist" rather than a "culturalist" point of
view. (12) Moreover, as post-Mao China embarked upon a reform
program that resembled ongoing experiments in Eastern Europe and
the Soviet Union, comparisons with other Communist systems
regained currency. (13)

The Challenge of 1989

Recently, students of contemporary China have been confronted
again by a crisis in understanding prompted by a popular protest
that defied the best predictions of specialists in the field. The
unrest of 1989, during which protesters in Beijing and other
major cities throughout China took to the streets to demand both
an end to official corruption and a guarantee of greater
political freedom, shook the very foundations of Communist Party
rule. With the help of the capabilities of modern communications
technologies, these same events also sent shock waves around the
world. The occupation of Tiananmen Square, the confrontation
between a lone protester and a row of government tanks, the
erection of a "Goddess of Democracy" statue, and the June Fourth
Massacre in which soldiers of the People's Liberation Army turned
their weapons upon unarmed citizens-images such as these appeared
immediately on television newscasts in countries across the
globe, alternately inspiring and horrifying audiences and
changing forever the way they thought about China.

The events of the 1989 protest and its subsequent repression had
an equally profound impact upon those who study China for a
living. Once again, the academic world was forced to question
many of its most basic premises about contemporary Chinese
society and politics. The present volume is an attempt to take
stock of some of the reconsiderations to which the 1989 movement
gave rise. As was the case with the Communist Revolution of 1949
and the Cultural Revolution of 1966-1969, the uprising of 1989
and its aftermath have generated more controversy than consensus.
Thus, the chapters that follow will not present a unitary
interpretation. Rather, they introduce some of the ways in which
leading scholars from different disciplines, with different areas
of expertise and different methodologies, have started to place
the recent events into perspective. All of the chapters are meant
to offer insights into distinctive features of the 1989 movement
and its consequences as well as to stimulate new thinking about
contemporary China in general. Taken as a whole, the essays
suggest some of the directions in which recent developments have
already begun to alter the analysis of Chinese popular protest.

Despite the diversity of these contributions, they share a
fascination with political culture, although the authors tend to
shy away from that particular term, tainted as it is with
unpleasant memories of past usage. As they did in the debates
that followed earlier crises in the unfolding of the Chinese
Revolution, scholars are again looking to indigenous precedents
to answer why the outcome in Beijing differed so radically from
that in Budapest, Bucharest, or Berlin. In so doing, they join a
"culture craze" (
wenhua re
) that has swept both Chinese and Western academic circles in
recent years. (14)

The New Political Culture

Is this culturalist trend nothing more than a temporary (and
perhaps misguided) phase, soon to be replaced by a more sober
return to elitist and structuralist modes of analysis? As
adherents of the neoculturalist perspective, we let our defense
rest upon the belief that this approach differs significantly
from previous efforts to explain Chinese protest in cultural
terms and that it offers a more credible, and thus longer-lived,
means of interpreting political change.

Whereas earlier cultural initiatives were promoted variously by
historians steeped in sinology or by political scientists seeking
to link up with the latest disciplinary fad, the current turn to
culture has attracted historians and social scientists alike.
Happily, recent years have seen a blurring of the sharp division
between history and the social sciences that emerged with the
second generation of contemporary China specialists. Gone are the
days when the year 1949 demarcated a strict disciplinary boundary
that was to be trespassed only at some risk to one's professional
standing. (15) Constructive interaction between history and the
social sciences has moderated the eccentricities of
antiquarianism, on the one hand, and paradigm faddism, on the
other, to which each of these branches of learning-if left to its
own devices-was often prone.

Another advantage enjoyed by scholars today is the greater
maturity and sophistication of both historical and contemporary
studies. Thanks to a generous infusion of new talent into the
China field, we have all learned a good deal about the
complexities of Chinese society and politics-past and present.
Our picture of "traditional" culture is a more refined one (with
greater appreciation of temporal and regional variation) than was
available to preceding generations. (16) Furthermore, our
understanding of the current scene also has been much advanced by
the access to fieldwork and other previously unobtainable sources
that has enlivened the past decade of research. (17)

One result of this new accumulation of knowledge is an aversion
to static or monochromic portraits of Chinese culture.
Differences in time period, social status, and geographical
location were, we now realize, characterized by important
distinctions in belief and behavior. As a consequence, the
challenge to the student of contemporary Chinese popular protest
is to discover which of a multitude of available cultural
repertoires is being drawn upon. Moreover, recognition of the
fluidity and flexibility of cultural practice alerts the analyst
to the possibility of innovation and originality. Rather than
seeing Chinese politics as forever condemned to a treadmill of
repetitive patterns, we look instead for creative deviation and
breakthrough. Such transformations in political culture, one
hastens to add, are not necessarily in the direction of greater
"secularization." One finds little evidence, in China or
elsewhere in the world, of a process whereby "traditional"
orientations inexorably give way to more "rational" modes of
thinking. (18) The dichotomous mentality underlying modernization
theory, it turns out, is a poor guide to the complexities of
political change in the real world.

But whether one is more impressed with continuity or with
transformation (a matter on which the contributors to this volume
differ among themselves), political culture is seen as an arena
of conflict as well as consensus-rooted in, yet not reducible to,
the social context. (19) Thus, in place of socialization (which
was credited in modernization theory with creating value
consensus), (20) neoculturalist approaches emphasize the
importance of symbolism, language, and ritual. Such "discourses,"
if we may employ that overworked term, are viewed as loci of
confrontation and contestation among social actors. Accordingly,
the connection between political culture and social context is
seen as intimate, indeed inseparable. As Lynn Hunt, a pioneer in
the analysis of the political culture of the French Revolution,
has written:

Revolutionary political culture cannot be deduced from
social structures, social conflicts, or the social identity of
revolutionaries. Political practices were not simply the
expression of "underlying" economic and social interests. . . .
This is not to say, however, that the Revolution was only
intellectual or that politics had primacy over society rather
than vice versa. The revolution in politics was an explosive
interaction between ideas and reality, between intention and
circumstance, between collective practices and social context.
If revolutionary politics cannot be deduced from the social
identity of the revolutionaries, then neither can it be
divorced from it: the Revolution was made by people, and some
people were more attracted than others to the politics of
revolution. A better metaphor for the relationship between
society and politics [than the metaphor of levels] is the knot
or the Mobius strip, because the two sides were inextricably
intertwined, with no "above" and "below." (21)

By providing "equal time" for cultural practice and social
structure, refusing to elevate either of them to the level of an
"independent variable," the neoculturalist perspective strives
for a comprehensive understanding of political change. It is this
feature of the approach, we believe, that will rescue it from the
short-lived fates suffered by previous culturalist efforts.

A political culture approach predicts neither that China will
remain forever unchanged nor that China is headed down the road
of convergence (either with the liberal West or with other
formerly Communist societies in Eastern Europe). It does claim,
however, that change will inevitably draw heavily on established
cultural repertoires. To make sense of popular protest will
therefore require serious attention to the language, symbolism,
and ritual of both resistance and repression. (22) And these, in
turn, can be deciphered only in historical context-as meanings
established over generations of political practice. Of course, no
society is immune from outside influence; patterns of change in
China are inevitably shaped by (and themselves shape)
developments elsewhere around the world. Yet the interpretation
of foreign models will proceed in Chinese terms-variegated and
variable as we now know these to be.

The chapters that follow examine the relationship between the
events of 1989 and changing Chinese repertoires of resistance and
repression. Preliminary as this excursion into neoculturalist
analysis is, we hope that it will stimulate more sophisticated,
similar endeavors in the future. Recent reexaminations of the
French Revolution demonstrate just how fruitful the approach can
be. (23) In stressing the diversity of the cultural material from
which both revolutionaries and authorities fashion their beliefs
and behaviors, we aim toward a more refined understanding of the
links to tradition than was evident in scholarship on the
Communist Revolution of 1949 and the Cultural Revolution of
1966-1969.

The Protest of 1989 and Chinese Political
Culture

In Part 1 of this volume, the contributing historians lay out
some guiding frameworks. The multiplicity of political legacies
that confronted both reformers and protesters in 1989 is the
subject of Ernest Young's contribution. As Young points out,
contemporary Chinese are heirs to several very different anciens
regimes: the imperial reign of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), the
chaotic warlord interregnum (1911-1927), the Nationalist rule of
the Kuomintang (1927-1949), and communism under Chairman Mao
(1949-1976). The often contradictory nature of these various
traditions has resulted in an identity crisis for Deng Xiaoping's
post-Mao reforms; confusion has surrounded the whole question of
which aspects of the past are to be altered. Although anxious to
demonstrate a transformative break with the conservative Qing,
for example, reformers have been equally anxious to avoid the
radical excesses of Maoism. Such dilemmas have led to a confusing
political discourse on the part of authorities and dissenters
alike. Thanks to "the multitude of ghosts that China's modern
history has conjured up," reformers turn into repressors and
democrats into elitists. Young asserts that we are dealing in
1989 "not only with the persistence of an attitude or with the
consequences of an unchanging Chinese political culture, but also
with a cumulative effect. Every generation's repetition of the
rationale for postponing democracy produces a changing meaning,
as well."

This theme of change within repetition is further pursued by
Joseph Esherick and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, who view the events of
1989 as "an exercise in political theater." Student protesters,
even when improvising, worked from familiar "scripts" of state
rituals and protest repertoires-some of which dated back for
millennia and others of which were of relatively recent vintage.
The centrality of ritual in imperial China was joined by new
forms of popular protest at the turn of this century to render
political theater a dominant mode of political expression.
Efforts by the Communist state to tame this behavior into
ritualized mass campaigns were not entirely successful, as both
the Cultural Revolution and the protests of 1989 make clear. Yet,
according to Esherick and Wasserstrom, Chinese street theater is
politically limited. Unlike in Eastern Europe, where democratic
institutions played a critical role in translating street theater
into programs for political change, in China a weak civil society
has undermined the development of pluralist politics.

In Part 2, Craig Calhoun, Lee Feigon, and I explore the bases of
participation in the social movement of 1989. In my chapter, I
stress the extent to which student protesters were fettered by
tradition. In their subservient style of remonstrance, their
search for political patrons, and above all their elitist
moralism, students evidenced patterns of belief and behavior
befitting the heirs of Confucianism. Picking up on the theatrical
metaphor of Esherick and Wasserstrom, I emphasize the limited
cast of characters included in the 1989 performance. Students
reserved for themselves the starring roles, relegating workers,
peasants, and entrepreneurs to the sidelines. The explanation for
this undemocratic style is, I suggest, structural:
Institutionalized links between students and state officials
continued to limit alliances of intellectuals with other social
groups.

The inegalitarian inclinations of student protesters is further
explored in Part 2 in Lee Feigon's discussion of gender. Despite
the prominence of Chai Ling and some other women leaders, males
dominated the upper echelons of the 1989 protest movement.
Moreover, neither men nor women showed a serious commitment to
overcoming gender-based inequality. According to Feigon, women
were prone to accept a state-defined image of femininity that
accentuated differences with men and confined women to less
public roles. Even the Goddess of Democracy, although ostensibly
a challenge to state authority, "demonstrated the hollowness of
this conception of feminine strength and of the dependence of the
student movement on the Chinese government." On the question of
gender, as on the issues of democracy and economic reform,
students were strongly influenced by state authority and logic.

In contrast to this emphasis on the limitations of student
radicalism, Craig Calhoun highlights the protesters' "capacity
for heroism." Calhoun reminds us that social movements involve a
constant construction and reconstruction of political identities.
Over the course of the protest movement itself, "the basic
self-identification of the protesting students in Tiananmen
Square-and not just their intellectual self-categorization but
their lived identity-was transformed, and at least for a time
radicalized, by six weeks of activism." Self-interest was
replaced by a willingness to sacrifice for the Chinese people as
a whole. Historical tales of martyrdom became exemplars for
contemporary acts of bravery that could not be explained in terms
of class position or concrete material interests: "That so many
rose to the challenge of their own ideals was crucial to giving
the events of 1989 their enduring significance."

In Part 3, two analysts examine the place of art and music in
the construction of new Chinese political identities. Tsao
Tsing-yuan's firsthand account of the making of the "goddess of
democracy" stresses the eclecticism of the sculptors who created
the statue that came to symbolize the aspirations of the protest
movement. Striving for "a new work of universal appeal," the
young artists at the Central Academy for Fine Arts borrowed
freely from foreign precedents. Like Calhoun, Tsao underscores
the selfless devotion of these students whose creation "was as
close to a true collaborative work as any project of this kind
can be."

Sculpture was not the only cultural vehicle for political
protest in 1989. As Andrew Jones explains in Part 3, popular
music also assumed an unprecedented importance: "rock bands
performed for hunger-striking students on the square, and satires
of government corruption set to popular melodies were regularly
broadcast over makeshift public address systems throughout
Beijing." In the wake of the suppression of the protest movement,
however, the politics of popular music have changed. Despite an
increase in the number of rock bands, their political criticism
has diminished significantly. In contrast to the universalism of
the Tiananmen era, today's musicians strive for "a distinctly
Chinese sensibility" and advocate "a nativist return to
traditional roots." Moreover, their search for commercial success
has resulted in a gradual abandonment of an oppositional cultural
politics in favor of what Jones dubs "commodity nativism."

In Part 4, the contributing authors focus more intensively on
the changing roles of intellectuals in contemporary China. Vera
Schwarcz contrasts the protagonists of the drama of Tiananmen
with earlier student movements. Superficial similarities between
the events of 1989 and the May Fourth Movement of 1919, she
argues, obscure a more disturbing parallel with the Cultural
Revolution. Although quick to commemorate their link to May
Fourth, many Chinese intellectuals overlooked the more painful
lesson of the Cultural Revolution: Student idealism could be
abused in the context of crowd politics. Like the Red Guards of
the 1960s, students in 1989 were, according to Schwarcz,
"swallowed by the language of political revolution." Exhilarated
with the heady taste of protest, they failed "to take notice of
the heavy burden of the past that hung over the sea of red flags
in Tiananmen Square."

Timothy Cheek further pursues the restraints on contemporary
intellectuals, noting that most Chinese intellectuals have yet to
make the transition from "priests" serving the interests of the
state to independent professionals. Operating under a "social
contract" that affords opportunities for public service and
scholarship in exchange for obedience to the state, many
intellectuals still cleave to their "old mandarin function."
Cheek suggests that the events of 1989 may have worked to
accelerate "the movement from priest-rentiers serving the cosmic
state (Confucian or Leninist) to professionals salaried in a
bourgeois society." But he concludes that this process is as yet
not far advanced, a situation that helps to explain why China's
popular protests did not result in the dramatic regime changes
witnessed in Eastern Europe.

In contrast to Cheek's emphasis in Part 4 on stability, Stephen
MacKinnon sees considerable evidence of dramatic transformation.
Noting that "it is hard to overestimate the effect in political
terms of American media penetration of Chinese cities," he
stresses the importance of the press-both American and Chinese-in
promoting political change. MacKinnon draws parallels between
journalism in the 1980s and in the 1930s-1940s (on the eve of
revolution). In both periods, he sees journalists as committed
"to a higher kind of loyalty: to truth outside the state."
Despite the effectiveness of Communist Party controls today,
MacKinnon looks forward by the end of the century to "the leading
contribution of both media to the creation of a civil society in
China."

According to Daniel Chirot, it was just such a process that
ultimately brought down the Communist states of Eastern Europe.
Part 5 contributors explore the relationship between regime
stability and popular legitimacy. As important as economic
problems were to the demise of communism in Eastern Europe,
Chirot argues that "utter moral rot" was the essential cause of
the collapse. Once the utopian ideology of the Party had been
discredited, charges of immorality fueled the public alienation.
Central to this development was the growth of a civil society,
where intellectuals and other urbanites wrote and talked about
alternatives to the corrupt rule of the Party-state. Looking
ahead, Chirot predicts that "more than ever, the fundamental
causes of revolutionary instability will be moral. The urban
middle and professional classes, the intellectuals and those to
whom they most directly appeal, will set the tone of political
change."

Tony Saich delineates a series of changes in state-society
relations in post-1989 China that "make the practice of rule much
more difficult." Highlighting a decline in the state patronage
system analyzed by Cheek, Saich sees among Chinese intellectuals
the emergence of a "more critically minded" form of expression.
From films and songs to jokes and hair styles, Party credibility
is being undermined by an alternative public discourse outside
the bounds of state control. The result, Saich concludes, is that
"the Party-state is denied legitimacy by much of its urban
population." Yet the prognosis is not necessarily an immediate
collapse of the system, as occurred in Eastern Europe. In place
of the state's moral authority, a "free-for-all urban society" in
China has undermined interpersonal relationships and led to a
moral vacuum.

The relative weakness of Chinese urbanites has prompted many
analysts to discount the likelihood of fundamental political
transformation in the near future. In Part 6, Jeffrey Wasserstrom
and Liu Xiaobo consider efforts by Western observers and Chinese
participants to make historical sense of 1989. As Wasserstrom
observes, Western interpretations have tended to present the
events of 1989 as tragedy-a noble quest doomed to failure.
Controversy has surrounded the question of who the protagonists
were (the students or Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang) and why they
failed (whether because of circumstances beyond their control or
because of their own shortcomings). Chinese accounts, by
contrast, have often portrayed the uprising of 1989 as romance-a
conflict between good and evil that results in the exaltation of
the hero. Here again there have been disagreements over the
identity of the protagonists (with Hu Yaobang, student martyrs,
or People's Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers variously assuming
this role in different versions) and over the meaning of their
struggle. For his own part, Wasserstrom favors a tragic narrative
that sees the uprising of 1989 "as related to but also
significantly different from earlier PRC struggles." He concludes
that "to leave open the possibility that the events of 1989 may
have fundamentally altered Chinese political arrangements, and
perhaps even Chinese political culture itself, is to suggest that
those who died on June 4 may not have sacrificed their lives in
vain."

The meaning of sacrifice is further explored in the concluding
contribution by Liu Xiaobo, a central figure in the events of
1989. Like Chirot and Saich, Liu speaks of a weakening of
legitimacy-but he sees this trend as largely confined to
intellectuals; among ordinary people, Deng Xiaoping's reforms
built "deep popular support and a solid, practical legitimacy."
Like Calhoun, Liu stresses the tendency of a protest movement to
take on a life of its own: "As soon as the kindling of revolution
is lit, it burns, the fire rapidly becoming flames that reach to
heaven." But he views this process of radicalization as the
ultimate undoing of the movement: "The illusion created by the
dynamism of the moment caused us to ignore the horrible
consequences which would result from the continual escalation of
the movement." Liu interprets the psychology of sacrifice and
martyrdom that took hold during the protest as a reflection of
the success of Communist Party education and as antithetical to
the process of democratization. Echoing the theatrical metaphor
that frames this volume, he confesses: "I don't know if we
university students and intellectuals who played the role of
revolutionary saints and democratic stars for two months can
reasonably, calmly, justly and realistically reevaluate what we
did and thought in 1989. . . . If we can, then the blood of June
Fourth will not have flowed in vain-it will still be thicker than
water. If we can't, then the blood of June Fourth will at most be
able to nurture those shameless bloodsuckers."

Conclusion

The year 1989 will undoubtedly go down as a watershed in modern
world history. Fittingly, the bicentennial of the French
Revolution was marked by protests across the globe raising many
of the same demands that we associate with the storming of the
Bastille. In Eastern Europe these protests brought about stunning
political change, whereas in China the uprising was brutally
suppressed. Yet the French precedent cautions against too early
or too easy an assessment of the ultimate results. Now, two
hundred years after the fact, scholarly reappraisals of the
French Revolution are revealing a far more complicated-if no less
consequential-event than previously recognized. Central to this
reconsideration is an appreciation of the significance of
political culture. (24) As liberating as the French Revolution
was, it was also limited by the rhetoric and rituals of the past.

Comparisons with France thus offer both inspiration and
admonition to the student of contemporary China. We must be alert
to the heavy hand of history-including its unattractive as well
as its appealing features-while remaining open to the possibility
of real change. Cultural traditions provide raw materials for
political action but not in any formulaic fashion. As French
historian Keith Baker puts it, "Political culture is a historical
creation, subject to constant elaboration and development through
the activities of the individuals and groups whose purposes it
defines. As it sustains and gives meaning to political activity,
so is it itself shaped and transformed in the course of that
activity." (25)

That Chinese political culture gives shape to recognizable but
flexible patterns of protest can be seen by comparison with
Taiwan, another Chinese society recently rocked by popular
unrest. In March 1990, a massive, week-long student sit-in
occupied the Chiang Kaishek Memorial grounds in the center of
Taipei. Their demands (for dissolution of the National Assembly
and direct elections of the President) were different, but the
style of protest was remarkably reminiscent of the previous
year's student movement on the mainland. The Chinese protesters
in Taiwan donned the same white headbands, broadcast the same
rock music, and undertook a similarly dramatic hunger strike as
their counterparts had done in Beijing. One Taipei student
captured the special attention of the media precisely because of
her striking resemblance to Chai Ling, the woman activist of
Tiananmen fame. Yet there were important departures, as well. In
place of the foreign-inspired Goddess of Democracy that loomed
over Tiananmen Square, the Taiwan students erected a huge
papier-mache lily, a native plant symbolic of both purity and
independence. And although Taipei protesters imitated the Beijing
exemplar in establishing a picket line to separate themselves
from ordinary citizens, the students actually welcomed members of
the labor movement, the farmers' movement, the women's movement,
and environmental and homeless advocates inside the cordon. (26)
Thanks to the socioeconomic changes of recent years, the
distinctions between urban intellectuals and other social groups
had become much less pronounced in Taiwan than was the situation
on the opposite side of the Taiwan Straits.

The importance of innovation within tradition forms the central
theme of this volume. The authors present popular protest as
anchored in, yet not immobilized by, longstanding cultural
practice. In analyzing the sources of change, moreover, we
acknowledge the inextricable and interactive connections among
society, economy, polity, and culture. While this new political
culture approach is still in its infancy in the contemporary
Chinese studies field, its application to the study of political
change elsewhere in the world is well established. Our hope is
that the further development of this perspective among China
scholars may improve our understanding of Chinese popular protest
so that future uprisings will find us better prepared than was
the case in 1949, 1969, or 1989.

5. For recent critiques of both the totalitarian and pluralist
perspectives, see Vivienne Shue,
The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body
Politic
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), chapter 1; and
Andrew G. Walder,
Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese
Industry
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), chapter 1.

6. The standard definition of political culture as "attitudes,
beliefs, values and skills which are current in an entire
population, as well as those special propensities and patterns
which may be found within separate parts of that population"
appears in Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell, Jr.,
Comparative Politics: A Developmental Approach
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), p. 23.

7. Ibid.

8. The main statements of this position were Lucian W. Pye,
The Spirit of Chinese Politics
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968); and Richard Solomon,
Mao's Revolution and Chinese Political Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). More recently,
Pye's
The Dynamics of Chinese Politics
(Cambridge: Oelgeschlager, Gunn and Hain, 1981) and
The Mandarin and the Cadre
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies,
1988) present updated versions of this line of analysis.

9. The standard was set by Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba's
comparative study of the United States, Great Britain, Germany,
Italy, and Mexico:
The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five
Nations
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1965).

10. For a critique from the sinological point of view, see
Frederick W. Mote's review of Solomon's book in the
Journal of Asian Studies
; for a social science critique, see Richard Kagan and Norma
Diamond, "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: Pye, Solomon, and the
'Spirit of Chinese Politics,'"
Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars
, vol. 5, no. 1 (July 1973), pp. 62-68. Another critical review
is John Gittings, "Bringing Up the Red Guards,"
New York Review of Books
(December 16, 1971), pp. 13-17.

12. William L. Parish and Martin King Whyte,
Village and Family in Contemporary China
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); and Martin King
Whyte and William L. Parish,
Urban Life in Contemporary China
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Walder,
Communist Neo-Traditionalism
; Jean Oi,
State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy
of Village Government
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); John P. Burns,
Political Participation in Rural China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); David Zweig,
Agrarian Radicalism in China
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). Notable exceptions
to the structuralist mainstream are Richard Madsen,
Morality and Politics in a Chinese Village
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Perry Link,
Richard Madsen, and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds.,
Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People's
Republic
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1989); and Helen F. Siu, "Recycling
Tradition: Culture, History, and Political Economy in the
Chrysanthemum Festivals of South China,"
Comparative Studies in Society and History
, vol. 32, no. 4 (October 1990), pp. 765-795.

14. On the Chinese side, the film "River Elegy" (
He shang
) was one influential manifestation of this trend. (For further
discussion, see especially the chapters by Calhoun, Jones, and
Saich.) See also Xiao Gongqin,
Rujia sixiang de kunjing
(The Confucian dilemma) (Chengdu: Sichuan People's Press, 1986).
On the Western side, influential works range from E. P. Thompson,
The Making of the English Working Class
(Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1963), to Pierre
Bourdieu,
Language and Symbolic Power
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).

15. Important examples of recent works that defy the traditional
dividing line are political scientist David Strand's
Rickshaw Beijing
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and historian
Philip C. C. Huang's
The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta,
1350-1988
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

16. Paul A. Cohen,
Discovering History in China: American Historical Writings on
the Recent Chinese Past
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1984) discusses these
developments. See also David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and
Evelyn S. Rawski, eds.,
Popular Culture in Late Imperial China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

17. For an overview of the contemporary field, see Michel
Oksenberg, "The Literature on Post-1949 China: An Interpretive
Essay," in Roderick MacFarquhar, ed.,
The Cambridge History of China
, vol. XIV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

18. In Almond and Powell,
Comparative Politics
, pp. 24-25, cultural secularization is described as "the process
whereby traditional orientations give way to more dynamic
decision-making processes involving the gathering of information,
the evaluation of information, the laying out of alternative
courses of action, the selection of a course of action from among
these possible courses, and the means whereby one tests whether
or not a given course of action is producing the consequences
which were intended." One need look only as far as the Islamic
Revolution in Iran or the fierce ethnic conflicts now raging
across much of Eastern Europe to grasp the obvious point that
political change may not lead to cultural secularization.

19. This point is made in Lynn Hunt, "Political Culture and the
French Revolution,"
States and Social Structures Newsletter
, no. 11 (Fall 1989), p. 2. See also Lynn Hunt, ed.,
The New Cultural History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

20. This view was of course heavily influenced by the work of
sociologist Talcott Parsons. For a critique of Parsons, see
especially Alvin Gouldner,
The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology
(New York: Basic Books, 1970).

21. Lynn Hunt,
Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 12-13.

22. Whereas the "new social history" has tended to stress the
popular resistance side of the equation, studies by political
scientists and anthropologists have often focused on the state's
use of symbolic power to maintain legitimacy. See, for example,
Murray Edelman,
The Symbolic Use of Politics
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964); Clifford Geertz,
Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Raymond Cohen,
Theatre of Power
(New York: Longman, 1987); and David I. Kertzer,
Ritual, Politics, and Power
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). For those who want a
general sense of the ways in which students of modern China have
come to terms with both sides of this equation, two of the best
places to start are Joseph W. Esherick and Mary B. Rankin,
"Introduction," in idem., eds.,
Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 1-24; and
Daniel Little,
Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of
Social Science
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). In discussing the work
of various China specialists, as well as leading scholars of
Southeast Asian protest such as James Scott and Hue-Tam Ho Tai,
Little uses the term "political culture" much as it is used in
this essay. See especially Little,
Understanding Peasant China
, pp. 183-184.

23. See especially Keith Michael Baker, ed.,
The Political Culture of the Old Regime
(Oxford: Pergamon, 1987); Colin Lucas, ed.,
The Political Culture of the French Revolution
(Oxford: Pergamon, 1988); and Francois Furet and Mona Ozouf,
eds.,
The Transformation of Political Culture, 1789-1848
(Oxford: Pergamon, 1989).

24. Ibid.

25. Baker, "Introduction,"
Political Culture
, p. xii. It is worth noting in passing that scholars working in
various parts of the world have begun using the term "political
culture" in the sense Baker describes. This is true, for example,
within Latin American studies, a field that (like Chinese
studies) was once heavily influenced by the Almond and Verba
approach, as well as other related theories that stressed deeply
ingrained national predispositions toward certain types of
political behavior. Recent and forthcoming studies of Latin
America that stress themes related to those addressed in this
volume (and use the term "political culture" in a similar
fashion) include Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, eds.,
Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the
Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1994); and Peter Guardino,
Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National
State: Guerrero, 1800-1857
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming), the author
of which explicitly associates his use of the term "political
culture" with Keith Baker's approach. See also the discussion of
political culture in Jeffrey L. Gould,
To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness
in Chinandega, Nicaragua, 1912-1979
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), pp. 188-189,
which stresses the need to pay close attention to the complex
ways that elite and popular cultural traditions intersect with
and diverge from each other.